Digital video (and more generally any multimedia sequence, i.e., audio, video, and pictures, or other lossy compression data) capabilities can be incorporated into a wide range of devices, including digital televisions, digital direct broadcast systems, wireless communication devices, personal digital assistants (PDAs), laptop computers, desktop computers, video game consoles, digital cameras, digital recording devices, cellular or satellite radio telephones, and the like. Digital video devices can provide significant improvements over conventional analog video systems in processing and transmitting video sequences.
Different video encoding standards have been established for encoding digital video sequences. The Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), for example, has developed a number of standards including MPEG-1, MPEG-2 and MPEG-4. Other examples include the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)-T H.263 standard, and the ITU-T H.264 standard and its counterpart, ISO/IEC MPEG-4, Part 10, i.e., Advanced Video Coding (AVC). These video encoding standards support improved transmission efficiency of video sequences by encoding data in a compressed manner.
Many current techniques make use of block-based coding. In block-based coding, frames of a multimedia sequence are divided into discrete blocks of pixels, and the blocks of pixels are coded based on the differences with other blocks. Some blocks of pixels, often referred to as “macroblocks,” comprise a grouping of sub-blocks of pixels. As an example, a 16×16 macroblock may comprise four 8×8 sub-blocks. The sub-blocks may be encoded separately. For example, the H.264 standard permits encoding of blocks with a variety of different sizes, e.g., 16×16, 16×8, 8×16, 8×8, 4×4, 8×4, and 4×8. Further, by extension, sub-blocks of any size may be included within a macroblock, e.g., 2×16, 16×2, 2×2, 4×16, 8×2 and so on.